Marketers of Technology
00:10:42 · Julie Maeker, Andres Figuera
[00:10:42] S0: Yeah, it's not all done via AI because we actually were founded already 02/20, so six years ago. So the product was actually built before the big AI wave came. But of course we went on the wave and are surfing it. So a lot of AI features are currently shipped as well and we are rebuilding the product. So it's really AI native also. So our goal in the end is to have all those trades businesses in Europe run on autopilot within the next couple of years so that they don't need to care at all about their office work, but rather and about invoices, quotations and so on, but that they are rather just talking to their phones and then the invoice will be sent automatically and everything is automated. That's the vision. Right now we have some first features, I would say, that are already serving into the direction of the mission or the vision, but not yet fully there, I would say. [00:11:45] S1: Okay, okay. And Julie, when you entered Plancraft as head of marketing, how was the potential customers and the audience receptivity to the product that Plancraft is offering? Was it that Plancraft was already placed as kind of, like, the leader or very known in the market? Or did you really have to do a revamp for their marketing in order for them to for like the audiences and the customers to really get to know you guys and understand what to do?
00:12:12 · Julie Maeker
[00:12:12] S0: Actually, it was a bit of a mix. So what I found when I joined Plancraft in March 2025 was a marketing team of seven. Like they had a lot of projects running. So each and every employee had kind of two big topics as responsibility. So for example, one of them was responsible for the whole creator marketing stuff but also for the website. So really broad like talents we had in the marketing team but also huge responsibilities they had. And back in the days we were only live in Germany and Austria, so only German speaking markets. What I actually did in the very beginning was to do an independent survey with like another provider, a real like brand awareness survey to get to know, okay, how high is our brand awareness in the audience we are actually serving to just know, okay, what's my status quo kind of, where's my starting point and what I can build on. So I actually asked myself the same question that you asked me now. Back in the days, we also did do a lot of performance marketing already. So we were live on a lot of channels already and like did do a lot of things, but I had the feeling, okay, we could use a bit more strategic angle and some more brand consistencies throughout everything we are doing and throughout the messages we are sending. So when I was actually getting the results of this brand survey, we actually only had a brand awareness of a one digit number, would say. So not that much in the audience. And now since it's more or less one and a half years ago, bit more, we did do a lot of things differently. We did bring a lot of strategy. We grew the team or I grew the team and in the end now we did another brand lift study just to know, okay, where we're standing now and how did we develop and how did the budget we spent also paid off. And actually, it more than tripled. So I think we're doing something right here.
00:14:19 · Andres Figuera, Julie Maeker
[00:14:19] S1: I love that. And how big is your team now, Julie? [00:14:22] S0: 26 people are we now? [00:14:24] S1: Okay. So it's kind of like the double a double of what you started out with. And Julie, in terms of those strategies you mentioned that you implemented that really helped you make awareness improve a lot more, could you maybe give us some examples or at least one of those things that you did that really worked well?
00:14:41 · Julie Maeker
[00:14:41] S0: Sure. So one of the things definitely is what we did. We actually hiring is not the only thing you scale a business, right? But I also try to provide a lot more structure and processes within the team. So just imagine being a team of seven, you don't really need like sub teams, you don't need a team lead, you don't need too much structure, but you just work together. You're just one team. But since I've figured, okay, we need to bring this whole concept a bit more from the starting line and build a brand that trades people love because especially in a world of AI, you need like, I had the feeling we need to build a brand here because this is our largest differentiator in the market because also in Europe we have a lot of competitors actually on like this product side. So what I did was I split the team in three sub teams. We then had a performance marketing team, a brand and content team who actually was responsible for the whole content engine, content creation, and to make sure the branding is consistent throughout every message that's gonna be shipped. And the performance marketing team was of course then responsible for steering all the different channels, testing new markets because right now we are also available in five markets, not only two in Europe. So we also expanded into new markets. And then the third team, and that was also one really huge pillar and really big branding that I think we made, was that we implemented a team that's built around the community. So they are kind of responsible to bring branding to life and to make us also to experience Plancraft in the end, to meet people from Plancraft, to really get in touch, to meet on eye level and to know the people behind kind of. So what they're responsible for are all our creators we're working with to build trust, our partnerships, they're responsible for events, stuff like this. So in the end we kind of restructured and then we did everything we reworked kind of. So we had a lot of things that already worked very, very well and that was really promising potential in some channels, for example, creators. You cannot believe in the construction world. It's not like in fashion where I came from. So fashion was like really advanced when it came to creators, right? And super expensive.
00:17:11 · Andres Figuera
[00:17:11] S1: I can only imagine.
00:17:12 · Julie Maeker
[00:17:12] S0: Yeah, crazy, especially in Europe. Like you have quite some, I mean in The US as well, quite some large influences that are also quite cost intense I would say. And the construction side, is a bit like couple of years back, I would say. So they are just building up and it's still super much on eye level. You can still really build real connections to the influencers. They are really identifying themselves also with the brand they are working for best case, which is in our case, luckily the case. And it's really interesting because you approach this whole sector super differently and they have then also of course a followership that is really trusting those influencers. So they are of course having like a lot less followers. So around, I think our largest influencer now has around 150 ks followers, but for Germany it's quite okay and for the construction work as well, but it's still affordable to invest in creators. And that's what we also put in the very early days to really invest in relationship with creators to kind of spread out the word because especially in construction, people don't trust performance marketing ads too much what they see on Instagram or Meta in general, but they rather trust people if they are recommending something. So this is definitely one of the biggest learnings. Word-of-mouth is like the biggest multiplicator you can have when it comes to brand perspective and brand positioning in the construction world. And this is also where we then shifted our focus. So of course you need like a very good baseline from a performance marketing perspective and the marketing mix need to be very sharp and you need to invest your budget, of course, with the ROI on the channel level. But on the other hand, we really focused on building up the community and investing money into trust building. And especially within this year, we placed two very big branding bets in Germany because it's our biggest and most mature market. And yeah, apparently that pays off. I'm very happy about that.